


The perils of data manipulation

by Sionnan



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Gordon is stressed, barney is perpetually hungry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:27:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26165611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sionnan/pseuds/Sionnan
Summary: Gordon does some after hours data analysis and comes to some dismaying conclusions. Barney rescues Gordon from research associate hell with sympathy and soda.
Relationships: Barney Calhoun & Gordon Freeman
Comments: 5
Kudos: 78





	The perils of data manipulation

Gordon stared, bewildered, at the array of data before him. It looked like nothing more than a bunch of numbers, vaguely identifiable in categories, before he realized what had happened. The system had saved the data's columns as rows, and the rows as columns. He had the sudden urge to scream or topple the monitor off of the desk. Instead, he hung his head and gave a rueful, slightly helpless chuckle. In spite of himself, he felt tears from strain and overwork sting his eyes, and he giggled again at his reaction, reaching up to pinch at the soft flesh between his eyes. He brought in a long, loud sigh that sounded small in the mammoth space. He reflected it was going to take him the better part of a day tomorrow to rearrange the data, maybe even longer. Then sorting and cleaning the data was going to take a few days, discarding values the system miscalculated or misunderstood. Hopefully it would run in the minority.

How had that reassignment of categories even happened? Gordon felt a little worm of panic wriggle through him. Had he been so tired that he had made a stupid, grad school level mistake? He stood up off the stool, the rapidity of his actions making it wobble away from him. He was breathing too fast. Stop it, Gordon, he scolded himself. You can't panic over something so stupid. The mantra of stop, stop, stop chased him through the room and out into the hall, where he nearly collided with one of the guards on red shift.

"Woah-- hey doc, sorry." It was Barney, his face and body patched with errant bars of light from the auxiliary bulbs, the main lights having been shut down. He had gripped Gordon by the upper arms to keep them both from slamming together, and he didn't let go right away.

Just as Gordon started to say, "I'm sorr--" he felt Barney squeeze his shoulders and ask, "Hey, is everything okay?"

Gordon nodded emphatically, pointing to the room that housed the bank of computers that housed the data from the mass spectrometer. "I gotta check something," he could only say, his voice so strained he nearly choked on the words.

Barney released his arms, and Gordon clocked the overt worry on the guard's face before he speed-walked down the hall, quashing the urge to book it. He heard Barney's boots clunk in the opposite direction, back the way Gordon had come, but figured he must have been checking to see if Gordon had secured the room. (He hadn't. He needed to go back that way anyway, if nothing else so that he could scream in the large room again to properly reflect his emotions. [That was a lie. He was probably going to go crumple into the fetal position in the men's bathroom.])

He let himself into the hermetically sealed room, hit by the smell of electronics working overtime in an air conditioned room. He skirted by one bank of computers before coming to a stop by a cabinet of almost early Cold War era computers. He tapped in his credentials, swore when it told him they were invalid, and then chicken-pecked his way through a second attempt. Gordon couldn't afford to let himself mess up again because he was flustered; the system locked you out after three missed attempts, and it was a major hassle to reprogram permissions into the older machines. He didn't need Kleiner's disappointed sigh or Magnusson's lecture on something so stupid when he had already fucked up the collection of the data so badly.

As Gordon tapped out the code to make the system list past commands, just to see if he had really misaligned the data arrays, he heard a series of light taps on the glass. He looked over and nearly jumped out of his skin, the chair jolting under him, as he saw the unintentionally nightmarish sight of Barney, face and forefront bathed in black, one hand raised to the glass. Gordon could make out a very muffled, "Sorry, doc," before he pointed at the door.

Gordon deflated slightly, figuring he was in from a pre-game lecture from the security shift before tomorrow's never ending circle of associate shaming. He stood from the terminal, and went to the door, pushing the button to let Barney in. The guard moved into an anemic pool of light, and Gordon saw the wry smile on his face and a couple of sodas in his hand as he sidled in. "Hey, Gordon," Barney greeted, again, and he felt a cold can, slightly wet from being carried in the warmer air, being pressed into his hand. "You looked like you could use this."

Gordon felt a disbelieving chuckle escape his as he gripped it a little too tightly, relief overtaking him. "I thought you had come down here to ream me out for leaving the lab door unlocked."

Barney snorted and opened the can, the sound loud in the small, dark room. The main lights had been shut off, and what light there was came from the corridor and the safety lights set in the concrete above them. "Hell naw," the guard said, taking a loud slurp from the can. "I figured you'd head back that way anyway. You're pretty much the only guy on this floor who remembers to lock up after himself."

Gordon digested that little bit of information as his trembling hands worked to pop the tab on the can, feeling a little better about himself. He took a sip of his soda as well, realizing he was stalling on handling his problems. Well, better to stall for a few minutes. He didn't want to deal with the looming problem. "Thanks for bringing me this," he said, the words becoming a sigh by the end.

Barney huffed a small laugh. "Not a problem. Looks like you had a long day." There was a brief silence before Barney continued, voice curious. "I thought you were scheduled to work 8 to 5 today. Are you pulling overtime?"

The question brought on a wave of disillusionment. No, he wasn't pulling overtime, he realized. This, all of this, was on his own time. He wasn't getting paid any extra for this, but the senior scientists seemed to expect a certain level of progress in the junior scientist's work that either suggested they invent time travel to account for the time it would take to get that progress, or work overtime. They were told multiple times, however, they wouldn't be cleared overtime pay because it would break the lab budget. So Gordon and the handful of other research associates spent hours at the lab doing work they often weren't even acknowledged for.

"Jesus," Gordon heard Barney say. He looked up from the can to the guards face, which had assumed an expression of open worry. "And I thought I had it bad," summarized the guard, who apparently had intuited Gordon's train of thought.

Gordon couldn't stop a sheepish grin from spreading on his face, embarrassed Barney had seen him slide into a spiral of self pity. "It's not that bad," Gordon dissembled. "It's just kind of been..." he waved his can around at the room. "Kind of a day," he finished lamely, and took in another mouthful of soda.

"I dunno." Barney returned, sipping meditatively. "I'd be kinda pissed if I had to stay four hours doing work I wasn't getting paid for."

"Yeah," Gordon acknowledged, slumping again. He really had to figure out a way to wrestle himself out of that grad school mindset of working 80 hour weeks. He looked sideways over at the bright terminal, the blinking prompt visible against the opposite bank of computers. Some of the urgency had deflated out of the situation, and it all just seemed a little tedious and sordid. "I'm gonna get reamed out tomorrow," he confided, voice more than a little reluctant.

"How so?" Barney's response was calm. He had stopped drinking to fix Gordon with a look in the halflight of the room.

Gordon shook his head, almost unable to admit to the sheer stupidity of the problem. "It was just a stupid mistake, but it's gonna take me at least a day to fix it."

"Ahhh." Barney's tone was knowing and sympathetic. "I feel ya there. Once I was trying to help troubleshoot a power problem for a bank of instruments, used the wrong tool, and shorted the electricity for the whole line. Took a week to replace the components that had blown."

Gordon visibly winced, imagining the time and money such a simple mistake would have cost a research project. "Was this for a lab?" he asked, tentative in his curiosity. Barney laughed around his can. "Nah. Materials transport. They probably woulda fired me if it had been for a lab."

Gordon huffed a laugh, figuring that was more than conceivable. Comparing a blown line to a data array mistake seemed to help put his problem in perspective. He took another, longer gulp of his soda, and said, "Thanks, Barney."

Gordon could hear Barney crunch the can in the dark, and lob it effortlessly into a trash bin somewhere in the dusk. "For what?" asked the other man, voice neutral.

"For the distraction," Gordon admitted. "I shouldn't have let it get to me." It was a small, indirect apology for making Barney interrupt his routine, for overreacting and making himself more of a concern than he needed to be.

"Nahhhh. It's not that. Hell, we all get there sometimes," Barney returned, brushing off Gordon's contrition. "You beat yourself up too much for this job," Barney observed.

Gordon didn't really know what to say to that. He took another drink from his can, then tilted back to let the last of the syrupy liquid trickle into his mouth. He hadn't realized how thirsty he'd been til Barney gave him the soda. He walked over to where he'd heard Barney land his can until he toed it in the dark, and dropped it in. "You're probably right," Gordon finally admitted. "I don't know what else to do, though."

"Take it easy on yourself, doc." Barney's voice was partly amused, partly chastising. "You didn't wind up here because you could polish a mean window."

That actually startled a laugh from Gordon, but again he didn't know how to respond to Barney's blunt insight. He treated Barney to a slight smile, before realizing Barney probably couldn't see him. "When is your break?" Gordon redirected. "I'm starved, lemme buy you a taco or something."

"Ooh, I like the sound of that." Barney was never one to turn down free food. "I was actually off when I ran into you in the hallway."

Gordon drifted back to the terminal, and looked at the rows of commands, stamped by time. "We'll head out in a sec," Gordon assured, voice distant as he skimmed the code. "I just gotta check this."

"Yeah. Hey, can we head over to that open air canteen? A couple of my buddies have been saying they've been watching weird lights on the Mesa, I wanted to see if they're fucking with me."

Gordon chuckled at that. He had no idea what the guards would have been seeing, but there was a kind of giddy romanticization of Black Mesa's sci-fi lore, not only because they were a classified facility in the middle of the New Mexican desert, but also because of the campus' old history as a decommissioned nuclear base. He couldn't count the number of old rumors he'd heard, ranging from cattle mutilations (when there were no ranches within 80 miles) to portals to other worlds tucked in the caves of the mesa. Gordon reserved his suspicion for the latter rumor, after having worked at Anomalous Materials for a while now. He'd seen some things in the test chamber he couldn't quite explain.

Gordon wasn't seeing what he was expecting to see on the terminal. In fact, apparently earlier that day, he had instructed the system to save resonance potential to columns, and time stamps to rows. That had exactly been what he had expected to see-- so what had gone wrong?

"Are you even sure you messed up?" came Barney's pointed voice. The man was a little too good in his insights. Gordon glanced up to see the man squinting at him across the room.

"I..." Gordon trailed off, tapping down through the commands. "I don't know. It doesn't look like I did, unless the machine ate my command."

"Does it do that?"

"Not that I've heard, but Murphy's law and all that." There was a stretch of silence before a realization struck Gordon. A wave of dread crested in his stomach. "Oh no."

"What?" Barney's voice was immediately concerned, and he had stepped over to stand by Gordon. "What's wrong?"

"I- These machines only show commands you made on your session." Gordon was struggling to sound level and diplomatic, shoving down the panic he was starting to feel.

"Okay? And?" Barney's voice was befuddled, probably partly at the explanation, but also at Gordon's seeming incongruous reaction.

"I didn't make any commands that would have made the system save the data the way I found it on the server."

A beat of silence. Finally Barney asked, "So did someone else make the command?" He sounded uncertain, like he wasn't quite sure what they were talking about, but he wanted to participate all the same.

Hearing it out loud made it sound even worse. Gordon swallowed back a lump in his throat and palmed his forehead with his hand. "Maybe? I don't know. It's possible someone else was configuring the system for a later simulation without checking if there was an active session, and it just saved the configuration to my sesion."

"Oh, boy." Even Barney sounded a little sick. "So they screwed you."

Gordon paused, turning it around in his head. "I don't know. Maybe the system just deleted my command."

Barney's voice was right over his shoulder, and when Gordon turned slightly he could see the guard's face near his. "How can you check?" He seemed concerned over this development, and Gordon reasoned he had a right to be. Lab mistakes generally weren't in the security detail's remit, but if it were intentional, or were investigated for its potential to be intentional later, Barney would be the guy admin would ask.

Gordon shrugged slightly helplessly. "I guess we'd need IT or someone with lab director credentials to access the system logs." Gordon could hear the sound of paper shuffling, and he turned to see Barney writing something in his little incident booklet. "Look," the guard said while he wrote. "It's pretty clear you can't do anything about this right now. IT's been closed for four hours, and you can bet no lab admin is around right now. Why don't you just save the system log so it doesn't get wiped, and we can pick it up tomorrow morning."

Gordon took a deep breath and stepped back a little from the computer, hands still clamped on the sides of the cabinet. He bent forward slightly, like a runner catching his breath after a sprint. After a second, he said, "You're right." He straightened, pulling off his glasses and polishing the lenses with his tie, a frown on his face. He put his glasses back on, and tapped the command for the system to save the data log to Gordon's remote storage, and signed off.

He turned back to Barney, who had put his pad back into one of the pouches on his utility vest, and was now treating Gordon to a searching look. Gordon swallowed back the remnants of the stark panic he had felt, and said, "I have to power down the terminal in the other room, and then we'll get tacos."

A slight smile quirked on Barney's face, tempered by a good amount of pity. He clapped Gordon on the back as the scientist passed him. "Lead on, pal."

Gordon realized he was feeling somewhat numb as he walked down the corridor. Probably partly from fatigue, but also probably his body had refused to process any more discomforting realizations. By the time he felt a little stirring of any identifiable emotion, he was on the tram with Barney, trundling along to the open air cafeteria. It was one of the few that operated at all hours, partly because it was a hub for a few different labs and tram stops. Gordon blinked at the stars dotting the sky above the dark lines of the mesa. Instinctively he frew in a breath, almost like he was trying to smell the night air, and straightened in his seat.

"There ya are, doc." Barney's voice was amused. "Was wondering when you'd come back to earth."

Gordon gave him a slight smile and slid down in his seat, letting the back of his head come to rest against the seat. "Sorry. Just kind of a long day."

"Yeah," Barney agreed, one hand coming up to scratch at his smooth chin. "Say, look over there. Do you see that?" The guard had suddenly leaned forward in his seat to excitedly point at something out of the tram.

Gordon squinted from his slumped position at the dark wall of the mesa across from them. "I think those are lights from another tram reflected from a tunnel."

"Nuh-uh. There's no line over there."

"Mmm. Pretty sure there is. I think it's the red line."

Their tram jolted to a stop and Barney stood, head still craned to where he had spotted the light, but he reached down to grab at Gordon's arm to help haul him up.

Gordon stood and followed Barney out, both leaning and peering out across the dark hollows of the mesa. They finally agreed, once they had stepped onto the dry scrabble of the canyon dirt, that neither of them could see the light any longer. “Shoot,” Barney griped, as he turned away from the canyon towards the canteen. Gordon stifled a smile as he fell in step beside the guard.

“You’d think we’d have at least one verifiable creepy critter sighting by now,” Barney grumbled as they both walked past the open air tables. Gordon let that one slide. Personally, he was happy Black Mesa was boring on that front; he already knew they were in all kinds of trouble for environmental hazards for storage and testing. He was pretty sure Black Mesa was still paying out for a class action lawsuit from back in the ‘50s when they had been testing uranium and plutonium. He didn’t even want to think of a habitation breach of any kind of creepy crawlies.

They both placed their orders at the line, where a single worker eyed them placidly across the glass counter. The presence of only one other person seemed to amplify the solitude of the little canteen, a single dot of light in the massive canyon enveloped in darkness. Gordon swallowed back a feeling of unease and let himself get pulled down the line to pay. He unearthed his wallet and slipped a bill onto the metal counter, listening as Barney recounted the stories of Black Mesa past guards, who swore by accounts of burying slimy humanoid creature far out in the desert. 

As they both sat at one of the tables, Gordon finally felt his discomfort of the evening ease, as he bit into his taco and watched as Barney sketched out a detailed map of Black Mesa zones, and where dubious remains were supposedly kept. It was kind of like being a kid again, telling scary stories about your neighborhood. Maybe tomorrow would be shit, but tomorrow was another matter. Tonight, he would listen as Barney Calhoun recounted the history of the three waves of Black Mesa invasions.


End file.
